The 1000th Post Spectacular!

Perhaps the title oversells this post a bit. Yes, this is my 1000th post on TCIC! The first 500 were "easy", written in my first year of blogging. I had lots of free time then! Over the past two-plus years I've been quite busy with job and travel in Japan. Though, I'm very happy to say that since the start of 2014, I've been posting every day.

When you post every day, milestones can come quick. Although I guess post 2000 won't show up until some time in 2016 or 2017 - 1000 days from now is March 13, 2017. (Thanks, Siri.) And that assumes one post per day, not missing any days or returning to posting twice a day.

So, what to do to commemorate my 1000th post? I could just do business as usual and show a few (or a ton of) cards, or talk about my collection and how it's changed, or something like that.

Well, things have changed. Of course, over three years, things change. When I started this blog, I would have never believed I'd be living in Japan. I didn't even think this would last. I seem to jump ship pretty often with abandoned websites and projects. Big dreams, over-reaching ambitions. You know. But somehow this has worked, and despite long breaks I've essentially stuck with it.

Yesterday, I learned that one of my childhood heroes passed away. I already wrote my tribute to Tony Gwynn, but it's still a bit of a shock. But they say that with every ending there is a new beginning, and I was inspired to search for one of my former students. I discovered that he is now playing in pro baseball and so far doing quite well! I'll have more on him in the future. And hopefully a lot more on him in the next 1000 posts.

And something a bit more fun to lift your spirits.

I thought I would share some statistics from my blog for these first 1000 posts. Maybe you'll find them interesting; if you do a little searching you can compare them to an earlier milestone post.

As of the time of this writing, almost a day before the post goes live, I have 118,771 page views. Whatever that means. My most popular post is this one, a Blog Bat Around with over 1000 hits - about 1% of my total page views (about ten times what it should be, on average). Rounding out the top five are two trade posts, a post on 2008 Donruss Americana, and a post on the Conlon Collection.

Other than Google, it should be no surprise that the Night Owl brings the most referring visitors. Everybody reads his blog, because, well, it's the best. And after that, pretty close behind, is the Sports Card Blogroll. Then, there's Japanese Baseball Cards, Crinkly Wrappers, Nachos Grande, and Cards from the Quarry. Oh, and some link farm called Vampirestat. Thanks, everyone, for making me a part of your blog roll or linking to me on your site!

What about search keywords? Jackie Mitchell leads the list, followed by "english plug" and "virginia hey".

Who reads my blog? US residents, by far. But also in the top 10 are (in order): Russia, Canada, Germany, Ukraine, Japan, UK, Taiwan, France, and China. Russia and Ukraine I don't really understand, but okay. Thanks for reading, everyone!

What browsers do you use: 29% use IE, 27% Firefox, and 22% Chrome. Safari users have 11% of page views. 71% of you use Windows computers, 9% use Mac, 9% use Linux, about 6% use iPhone, iPad, or iPhone. And 1% on Android.

In 1000 posts, I've accumulated about 1800 comments. A large percentage of those are mine, of course.

So, those are the stats Blogger provides through the interface. As always, thank you for reading and commenting! I hope you all in the States continue to find my blog interesting, even when it is mostly Japanese baseball and idol cards!